As the originators of the project bank account (PBA) model, my colleagues at Rider Levett Bucknall and I were delighted to see your legal columnists giving a positive welcome to the PBA (8 January, pages 62-65).

This is good news for the Rider Levett Bucknall team who developed the PBA model in 2001, successfully implemented it on the Ministry of Defence north Andover project and have been continuously improving it over the past seven years. This simple management tool was vital in supporting and showing people that “open book” really meant something. On Andover, it meant overcoming one of the great causes of frustration and loss of trust in the construction process – the unreasonable withholding of money from the supply chain.

Since Andover, we have been working with Barclays and Bank of Scotland to refine and develop this model into a fully operational fair payment solution for use by the whole construction industry. The Bank of Scotland PBA was launched on 24 January and Barclays is due to launch its own in spring.

We have also developed training modules, endorsed by both the Office of Government Commerce and Constructing Excellence, to help clients and delivery teams using a PBA for the first time. With this and the proposed new PBA versions of major construction contracts, all the tools are in place to enable a new era of fair payments to happen.

David Bucknall, chairman, Rider Levett Bucknall

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